


Disposable Kodaks and Flat People

by fhsa_archivist



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-09-15
Updated: 2007-09-15
Packaged: 2019-02-05 18:38:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12800001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fhsa_archivist/pseuds/fhsa_archivist
Summary: prompt: rain/maps (lost, found, treasure, train journies





	Disposable Kodaks and Flat People

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Haven, the archivist: This story was originally archived at [Fandom Haven Story Archive (FHSA)](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Fandom_Haven_Story_Archive), was scheduled to shut down at the end of 2016. To preserve the archive, I began working with the OTW to transfer the stories to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in November 2017. If you are this creator and the work hasn't transferred to your AO3 account, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Fandom Haven Story Archive collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/fhsa/profile).

There's something about rain that makes her feel like she's in one of those "film noir" movies. The stones of the buildings around her hold the heat and the humidity climbs oppressively. Condensation beads on a can of Coke and trickles over her fingers, dropping to the stone floor.

 

The words on the can are in Spanish.

 

She didn't know it rained this hard in Spain. It sluices down the aged architecture and washes into the narrow streets of Cadiz while she watches from the relative safety of a church doorway. There's a strange monument just across the Plaza from her. The number 1827 is etched in marble at its base. When she first saw it, she thought how odd that the numbers were in English. Then she glanced at the Coke, realizing that numbers here in Spain are just like numbers back home and she feels a little guilty for being so presumptuous. Arrogant American, she chides herself. 

 

They don't have Coke with Lime yet. At least not at the news stand on the corner where she bought this one, this plain one. 

 

Cadiz is a couple of hours away from Sevilla by train. According to the single-sheet paper she'd gotten from a crowded bulletin board at the noisy hostel, the train station is about a mile west, toward the coast, but not the bay. The paper does a poor imitation of the city streets, it's hand drawn and mimeographed, but it's readable, even in another language. 

 

The rain continues and she remembers the pastel houses she passed earlier, wondering how long they kept their bright and shiny coats of color under the long days of Moorish summer and a deluge of rains like this one. A man at the door of the church, dressed in the garbs of a priest, invites her in and she shakes her head, adding "gracias". He shrugs and returns inside.

 

She was here. Ten years ago. There was a festival and a parade that encompassed most of the population and a good portion of the square footage of streets. She got caught up and swept along with the crowd as they followed the floats, strangers pressing glasses of sangria and beer into her hands, followed by greasy potato chips or bits of torn bread. It's why she's here now.

 

Revisiting all the places she'd been before, marking the changes, marking the time and distance that she's come since being there. The rain isn't slackening.

 

She studies the monument again, ignoring the unused camera in the bottom of her leather backpack. It's a token, a gris-gris to remind her of a long stack of boxes back home in storage. A dozen boxes of lonely, aging photographs of landscapes, buildings and bridges, and maybe people. They mark a journey she's only dimly aware of having made with places she doesn't really remember and faces whose names are long gone. 

 

No pictures this time.

 

When she does reach automatically for the disposable Kodak, she reminds herself to stop and see the places before her, speak to the people who would have been flat and dimensionless in the photograph, to realize there is more in the view in front of her than the tableau that fits into the viewfinder of a camera.

 

This time she will experience the journey instead of documenting it, reliving the moments of it later only as a steady flow of memories, forcing herself to relish each one as it passes without a safety.

 

She steps into the rain. Her skin is still waterproof and the train for Sevilla leaves in just under an hour.


End file.
